Top Drone: Will Fighter Robots Replace Fighter Pilots?

America's aircraft carriers face fresh threats. But will the new breed of warplanes that meet those threats be flown by top Navy pilots, or will they be incredibly advanced autonomous UAVs? The dogfight for the future of navy flying is on.

For Ensign Kyndra Chitwood, learning how to fly blind is just part of becoming a U.S. naval aviator.

The 23-year-old strides across the flight line at Naval Air Station Whiting Field. Around her, dozens of orange and white T-34 Mentor training aircraft are lined up, fuselages gleaming in the Florida sun. Pairs of student—trainer teams in flightsuits are making their way to and from the aircraft. A formation flight of two T-34s cruises overhead, wingtip to wingtip.

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Chitwood is readying herself for a tense afternoon in the air. A typical five-day week at Whiting, 25 miles northeast of Pensacola in the Florida panhandle, features daily flying tests; each is a high-pressure evaluation. Today Chitwood must prove she can pilot the T-34 using instruments alone.

Just after takeoff she will pull a nylon hood across half of the cockpit canopy to block her vision, then steer the single-engine prop plane through landing approaches at several civilian airfields. She will be asked to demonstrate her ability to use GPS signals, UHF transponders on the ground and radio commands from radar operators.

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Within 40 minutes of suiting up, Chitwood and her instructor are cleared for takeoff. The aircraft buzzes down the runway and sails into the sky, banking toward Marianna Municipal Airport, 120 miles east. She would normally handle takeoff on her own, but the instrument tests require that she sit in the T-34's back seat, so her instructor guides the aircraft into the air.

The clouds are so thick she can't see the horizon, so there's no need to pull the hood closed. Once her instructor removes his hands from the controls, the day's aerial evaluation will begin.

Kyndra Chitwood

Primary flight instruction here is the start of a process that makes U.S. naval pilots the best in the world. Every student in the class is graded on a bell curve, and those who score highest usually get first choice of flight assignments.

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These aviators are jockeying against one another for seats in cockpits, but the generation of naval pilots after Chitwood may be grounded by new competition: robots. The Navy is aggressively researching the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for jobs now performed by people. By the time a pilot like Chitwood retires in 2030, assuming a full career, there could be a lot fewer aircraft for her replacement to fly.

Dogfight for the Future

Strike fighters are the teeth of an aircraft carrier, protecting the ship from aerial threats and attacking targets on the ground. The idea that UAVs can perform these missions is heretical to officials who say that a carrier deck is too complex for an unmanned aircraft. But the orthodoxy is changing, and two naval aircraft are now vying for future dominance.

In one corner, there's the Navy's marquee future warplane, the F-35C Lightning II. A product of the Joint Strike Fighter program, the F-35C will be the Navy's first stealth aircraft. At $133 million per airplane, it is the most expensive defense program in the world.

The JSF program started in 1996; five years later, Lockheed Martin beat Boeing for the multibillion-dollar contract. The program is producing three F-35 variants: one for the Navy, another for the Air Force and a short-takeoff and vertical-landing version for the Marine Corps. Each aircraft is now nearing the end of a tortured development—years late and tens of billions of dollars over budget.

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In the opposing corner is the X-47B, an experimental airplane with something to prove. Even though it's just a demonstrator, it has folding wings that enable it to fit inside a carrier's hangar, twin weapons bays and the ability to fly at high subsonic speeds. The program started in 2000 as one of two $2 million concept studies, but the UAV is no longer a line-item underdog.

The X-47B is a testbed supporting the $2.5 billion Unmanned Carrier Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike program. UCLASS may result in an unmanned aircraft that can perform the same missions as the F-35C but would stay in the air longer and be harder to spot on radar.

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When he was selected to head the X-47B program in late 2010, Capt. Jaime Engdahl thought the UAVs would be remotely piloted onto the deck with a joystick. "I didn't even realize, until I really started digging, how advanced some of the things that we're doing are," he says. "This is, no kidding, making an air vehicle that's autonomous and as self-sufficient as a naval aviator."

A few years ago, predictions that the F-35C would be the last piloted Navy fighter seemed overly dramatic. But as the X-47B progresses, the prediction is more realistic. The Navy will not deploy the F-35C on a carrier until late 2016. The Pentagon plans to integrate strike UAVs into the fleet by 2018.

Despite stalwart support from Navy brass, politicians are considering trimming the F-35C and other JSF variants: In 2010 the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (Bowles-Simpson Commission) recommended halving orders of F-35Cs.

There are signs that the budget crisis may change the landscape within the Navy. Aviation Week obtained a 2011 memo from U.S. Navy Undersecretary Robert Work asking Navy brass to seek alternatives to the F-35C. (He also asked the Marine Corps to examine the impact of eliminating the problematic F-35B.) The response will be ready for the 2013 budget.

The Navy's need for the F-35C and the new UAVs is based on the emergence of fresh threats. Any future strike aircraft needs to be stealthy—advanced radar and antiaircraft missiles make strike and surveillance missions dangerous.

There are other threats that will likely force carriers to operate at greater distances from targets. China is fielding submarines that can lurk in the shallows, where side-scan sonar is less effective. These quiet subs are armed with sea-skimming missiles that can slip past a ship's defenses. The Russians build and sell sophisticated warplanes that can venture from air bases on land to swarm a carrier and its escorts with air-to-ship missiles.

The emergence of these close-to-shore threats is bad news for the Navy because the reach of its strike aircraft has been decreasing since the 1980s. The F-35C's 640-nautical-mile combat radius will reverse the trend, but UAVs such as the X-47B easily double that distance.

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And there's another metric to consider: the amount of time a stealth warplane can linger over a target. The military calls this attribute persistence. A manned aircraft's persistence is limited by the endurance of the human onboard. A weaponized UAV, on the other hand, can track a target for dozens of hours in protected airspace and then drop a precision weapon on command.

"My thinking is that [UAV adoption] is too damn slow," Adm. Gary Roughead, chief of naval operations, said during a speech in August. "We've got to have a sense of urgency about getting this stuff out there."

Where Robots Get Their Wings

This July, Lt. Jeremy Debons made aviation history by doing nothing at all. DeBons, call sign Silas, flew a one-of-a-kind F/A-18D through the vast Atlantic test range off the coast of Virginia. His destination: the aircraft carrier USS Eisenhower. The F/A-18D and the carrier were loaded with a slew of sensors that enabled the warplane to land on the carrier's deck without any piloting from the cockpit or remote operation by the ship's crew.

The F/A-18D was a surrogate for the X-47B demonstration aircraft. The goal of the summer tests was to prove that the brains of a robot can guide a warplane to a carrier's pitching deck. If this demonstration program succeeds, the Navy can proceed with the UCLASS procurement. After the X-47B becomes carrier-ready, it will then autonomously rendezvous with aerial refueling tankers.

Future unmanned aircraft will not be flown by crews via joystick, as Air Force personnel currently operate MQ-1B Predators. Once launched, a UAV following a prearranged mission plan will use onboard sensors to avoid other aircraft and dodge enemy attacks. It will also identify targets in the air and on the ground and track them without direct command. (These UAVs will contact controllers for permission to release weapons.)

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Landing on an aircraft carrier is one of the most difficult feats of aviation, requiring a clever mesh of man and machine. The Navy is building the X-47B's landing capability on technology pilots use today, the Precision Approach Landing System. PALS uses SPN-46 radar to locate an aircraft in relation to a carrier.

To perform the occasional hands-off landing, such as when weather obscures the ship, an F/A-18 pilot can couple the plane's autopilot with PALS data. But the PALS radar covers only the rear of the carrier and is limited by the number of aircraft it can track simultaneously. These deficiencies make it unsuitable for controlling UAVs that are approaching to land.

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Instead, the Navy's robotic landing system relies on precise GPS coordinates to obtain 360-degree coverage and automate navigation. The airplane calculates the appropriate flight paths around the ship as the carrier supplies the vessel's speed, the sea state and other data.

The concept behind the X-47B is to replace pilots—but not a ship's crew. As with other carrier-borne aircraft, the final approach of the unmanned vehicle would be monitored by the personnel onboard. Officers on the flight deck, the air traffic controller seated under the deck and officers peering from windows in the carrier's island all play a part in guiding the UAV.

Pilots most often talk with the ship by radio, but for a UAV verbal communication is replaced by digital commands. The carrier's air traffic controllers do the same job as an ATC crew in a civilian airport tower—if the runway were constantly changing location, the aircraft loaded with live weapons, and the process designed to produce as few electromagnetic emissions as possible to avoid detection.

"There's no benefit in changing the way we do deck handling," says Adam Anderson, who heads the carrier integration portion of the X-47B program at Patuxent River, Md. "We're looking at ways to make the least amount of impact. We want a paradigm shift in the number of missions the aircraft can do, but to have no shift in the way it lands."

DeBons's test flights on the Eisenhower went perfectly—the F/A-18D glided across the deck with its nose angled up until a hook on its tail snagged a cable stretched across the deck and jerked the aircraft to a halt. Still, the Navy test pilot says his hands never strayed too far from the controls.

"It wasn't anything new, perspective-wise, in the cockpit," DeBons told reporters after the flight. "But being a new system, as any test pilot will say, we're always on guard."

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Human/UAV Coexistence?

The X-47B's next big milestone is a series of aircraft carrier launches and landings in 2013. That is the same year that the F-35C will operate for the first time on a carrier, making its initial sea trials.

A technology demonstrator is a long way from a production-ready warplane like the F-35C. Even the most gung-ho Navy official extolling UAVs also expresses support for the Lightning II. "As rapidly as we want to engage with the unmanned systems on carriers, we are also moving forward with an incredible capability in the Joint Strike Fighter," Roughead says. "We've got to get that aircraft."

The pilot is the F-35C's main limitation, but the human being in the cockpit may also be its salvation. The F-35C is designed to accommodate and enhance the most powerful processor available—the human brain. The aircraft's external sensors are patched directly into the pilot's helmet, allowing him to see 360 degrees by synthesizing data from the sensors, including six infrared cameras and radar. In short, there has never been a better airplane for picking targets and seeing threats.

"Target recognition often involves the generation and interpretation of high-resolution images," Owen Cote Jr., the associate director of MIT's Security Studies Program, wrote in a recent report. "At some point in the future it may become possible to automate that process, but today, and for a number of years, target recognition will require people to interpret the images ... It is difficult to imagine automating this."

Others caution putting too much faith in stealthy UAVs as a solution to every tactical and budgetary problem at the Pentagon. "If you canceled the F-35 you would have to do something else," says Douglas Barrie, military aerospace senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. "Do you kick off a whole new development program with all the inherent risks and costs that you've just gone through with the F-35?"

It appears that the Navy's near future will focus on human—robot teaming. The F-35C and UCLASS will operate from carriers simultaneously and fly missions next to each other in tomorrow's conflicts. "No platform fights alone anymore," says Edward Timperlake, a former analyst of emerging technology for the office of the secretary of defense. "It's a synergy between manned and unmanned."

But as time goes on, UAVs will become more capable and the ratio of manned to unmanned missions could dramatically shift in favor of the machines. "The era of manned airplanes should be seen as over," the Brookings Institution's Michael O'Hanlon says, echoing other military analysts.

Few young pilots see a threat looming. After all, the number of people the Navy needs to fly is holding steady. The students at Naval Air Station Whiting Field say their careers remain unclouded by robotic competition.

"I don't see anyone concerned about the community shrinking," says Lt. j.g. Bobby Lennon, who finished training at Whiting in August and will fly an MH-60S Knighthawk helicopter. "Maybe this will affect the jet guys more."

But the Navy's effort goes beyond the X-47B. The service is investing $8 billion over the next five years in a family of unmanned UAVs. For example, the Navy plans to retire fixed-wing EP-3 Aries signals intelligence reconnaissance planes and replace them with unmanned aircraft by 2020. The Navy is already operating unmanned reconnaissance helicopters—one was shot down during combat operations in Libya—and it is constructing larger ones to carry cargo and arming others with air-to-surface missiles.

Chitwood, who aced her instrument flight examination over Marianna Municipal and Tallahassee Regional airports, is also unfazed by the emergence of UAVs. "I'm not really worried," she says. "It's hard to integrate them into the fleet. Maybe when I'm close to being done flying I'll see the effect."

It doesn't seem fair to bring up the Navy's unmanned programs when face to face with young aviators. That's policy talk, and every new Navy pilot is solely focused on the work. For them, earning the right to do the job is the only tomorrow that matters.